India's Sexist Legal System

Twelve million Indian girls have been aborted in the last three decades, a 2011 study in the British medical journal Lancet found. Other girls die due to preventable diseases such as pneumonia and diarrhea, because they are sidelined in favour of their male siblings when it comes to access to health care and nutrition.  The number of girls under six years old has fallen for the past 50 years and there are now 919 girls to every 1,000 boys, against 976 in 1961, according the 2011 census. According to the latest UN Gender Equality Index, India has one of the worst gender differentials in child mortality of any country, ranking 132 out of 148 nations, worse than Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The United Nations said Indian laws promote a preference for sons over daughters. Bans on child marriage, pre-natal sex selection tests and dowries are poorly enforced, while laws excluding daughters and widows from inheriting land still exist, a study by the UN World Population Fund (UNFPA) found. Kirti Singh, a lawyer and author of the UN study said a lack of political will meant many gender laws are not enforced. Others, she said, are blatantly discriminatory and encourage the view that a male child is more valuable. New laws, she said, were required to criminalise marital rape and so-called “honour killings”.

“There is, for example, the Goa polygamy law which actually permits a second marriage for the husband when there is no son from the first marriage,” Singh explained , referring to the coastal Indian state. “There are also laws in some states which do not allow daughters and widows to inherit land.”

In much of India, a preference for male children is built into cultural ideology. Sons are traditionally viewed as the breadwinners who will carry on the family name and perform the last rites of the parents – an important ritual in many faiths. Girls are often seen as a burden that parents can ill afford, largely due to the hefty dowry of cash and gold jewelry that is required to marry them off.